It’s that time of the year again, when Apple shows all the new things in all the different OSes. This year though, the presentation was a bit light on narrative, but pretty packed with features.
What became obvious pretty fast — it doesn’t make sense to divide this presentation by OS and I think in the future Apple will just talk about services and apps because everything works everywhere.
Since we are not there yet, they still talked about each OS separately, but more often than not it ended with a “feature is available on all other platforms as well”.
FaceTime
Even if all those features were announced last year it still would have been a bit late, not to say — fall of 2021. But better late than never. I was surprised how janky the Voice Isolation demo sounded, but I hope it will be good in the released version.
SharePlay is an interesting feature, but I don’t see myself using it much. We’ll soon have cinemas opened for vaccinated people, and I’m not a big fan of watching TV shows with friends. But there are probably people who want this. I could see myself watching sport events like that, but I don’t think local TV providers will support this feature soon (or at all).
Focus
In 2021 Apple re-invented profiles which you could’ve found on Nokia phones 20 years ago. You can now create Focus modes for work, home etc. It allows you to make different home screens for different modes and allow notifications only from certain apps or people. This also means, that you can put multiple launchers for one app.
There is Summary for notifications, which will show only the most important ones and Do Not Disturb will show a message when someone tries to reach you via iMessage (similar to Slack).
iCloud and Privacy
You can add people you trust for an Account Recovery, so when you forget your password, you will be able to restore it with their help. You can also choose people as legacy contacts, so they can access your Apple account in case of your death.
On a lighter note, Mail now has an option to hide your IP, location and whether you’ve opened a message, basically rendering tracking pixels useless.
Privacy Report which was introduced last year in Safari for websites will now be available for apps. It will show how often an app has accessed Location, Camera, Contacts, Photos in the last 7 days, as well as all the domains the app is contacting.
Siri has on-device speech recognition, which for me is not so much a privacy improvement, but a massive improvement in speed.
Paid iCloud is now iCloud+ with Private Relay — which encrypts Safari traffic (almost like a VPN). It will also let you hide email, by creating random one for forms on websites.
Safari
Safari got a redesign on all platforms. Tabs are now very compact and in line with the address bar. There are also tab groups, which you can name, and they sync across devices. On iPhone, the most significant changes are — address bar is on the bottom, you can now slide across tabs with the same gesture as you do sliding across apps and web extensions will be available on mobile.
QuickNote
On iPad, you can swipe from the corner with the Apple Pencil and a small Notes window will appear where you can make a note. If you do it on a website, it will show you the note next time you visit it. The QuickNotes sync and work across devices.
Universal Control
This was probably the best demo of the keynote. You can use a single mouse and keyboard to control all your devices. Just put your iPad besides the Mac and you will be able to move the cursor from Mac to the iPad without any setup.
My mind was blown, when Craig added the iMac on the left of the MacBook and used the mouse to go all the way from the iMac to the iPad through the MacBook in the middle and dragged the file across three devices just to drop it on the iMac.
iPadOS 15
This actually is a bit of an exception, since there were a couple of iPadOS-specific features. First, as everyone could have guessed they added Widgets, with some bigger options (up to a quarter of the screen). App Library is also available on the iPad now and is accessible with an icon in the dock and by swiping to the last page.
The multitasking is rethought… again. It is more visual, with buttons and hints.
It is possible to develop and submit iOS and iPadOS apps to the App Store from Swift Playgrounds.
Miscellaneous
- Apple Maps are even more amazing in San Francisco.
- Government IDs, house and hotel keys and work ID in Apple Wallet
- Low-power mode on macOS.
- You can AirPlay to the Mac (both the video and sound).
- Multiple timers on Apple Watch (but only on Apple Watch).
- Conversation Boost — focuses AirPods Pro on the person talking to you. You can reduce the amount of ambient noise in the settings.
- Shared With You — things shared with you in iMessage will appear across multiple apps (Music, News, Podcasts, etc.)
- Live Text — you can copy and paste text from the photo (seems to work flawlessly in the demo). And it can recognise objects.
- Shortcuts for Mac, which will replace Automator.
- Health Sharing — you can see data of your parents or kids. Alerts, like for heart rate or steadiness. Apple doesn’t have access to this information.
